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Laura Dern's innocent horniness as the servant girl who gets a middle-class Southern family all hot and bothered was one of the year's comic and erotic delights. Calder Willingham's script and Martha Coolidge's direction flavored a warm, steamy brew with just the right amounts of lemon and honey.
10. THE COMMITMENTS
If you can still sing along to a movie four months after it opens, it probably deserves to be here. The music in Alan Parker's let's-put-the-show- on-right- here-in-Dublin entertainment is classic '60s rhythm and blues performed by white folks with a brogue, but the spirit is reverent and genial, not culturally imperialistic. The soul is part Wilson Pickett, part early Beatles; the guts are supplied by 16-year-old lead singer Andrew Strong. See this roadhouse lark again and feel better about 1991.
THE LONGEST YAWN
What is longer than the fully erect ego of a movie director determined to make a "statement"? The patience, obviously, of movie executives determined to indulge his or her imperious auteurship. And the inordinate length of the movies now trying our patience. The good (JFK) would be better, the so-so (The Prince of Tides) greatly improved, and the bad (Hook) less tiresome if everyone would learn to get on and off in under two hours. Give us a break, guys.